Texas Drive by Bill Dugan Read Free Book Online Page A

here.”
    O’Hara nodded. “Alright then. We’ll be back tomorrow, probably around noon, soon’s the sheriff gets back. Don’t expect him to tell you anything I didn’t already tell you, though. We had the fever rip through here twice in the last four years. Tore hell out of the few cattle we have. Oscar, here, lost near a whole herd of dairy cows.”
    Johnny snorted. “
Dairy cows
. Hell, man, no wonder. You might as well keep kitty cats or butterflies. What we got is sure enough Texas beef, tough as nails and mean as a grizzly.”
    “Maybe so, but what
we
have is what mattersto us. You keep them cows down by the river until tomorrow.”
    Johnny shrugged. “Yeah, yeah, I heard you.”
    O’Hara delegated three men to stay, then he and the others trudged back up the hill behind them. A few minutes later, the cowhands could hear the creak of wagons as the farmers departed. Johnny laughed. “Christ almighty, damn
wagon
jockeys, no less. Rafe, I sure as hell hope you know what you’re getting into. This don’t work out, I might have to take up knitting.”
    “You just knit up them lips of yours for a few hours, and everything’ll work out.”
    The three farmers kept apart, each of them sitting nervously with a rifle across his knees. The herd pushed on across the river, but Rafe strung pickets to make sure they didn’t try to climb the ridge. When the last few stragglers were on the Kansas side, he gathered the hands and told them they were stopping for the night. Most of them took it in stride, although Dan Harley glanced at Johnny as if to ask why he was letting this happen.
    As the sun went down, they sat around their campfire, conscious of the silent farmers on the hill above them, preferring to sit in the dark rather than join the cowboys for a meal. One of them kept jerking the lever on his old Henry carbine in what Rafe hoped was a nervous habit rather than a desire to use the weapon. The first shot fired, nomatter by whom, would kill whatever chance there might be for compromise …
    And they didn’t need another setback. Not now, when they had come so far and were so close.
    Johnny walked off into the darkness, down along the river. Rafe wanted to follow, but Johnny sent him back. “You can handle things, Rafe, so handle ‘em. I need a little time to myself.”
    “You sure, Johnny?”
    “Hell, Rafe, I’m not sure of nothin’, no more.”

7
    THE HALF-DESERTED SPREAD weighed on Ted like a flat rock across his shoulders. Three months without a word from Johnny, and there was no hope of one, anytime soon. And every day, he went through the same routine. The small patch of vegetables he’d started reminded him of his brother. They had fought about it when he put it in. Vegetables were for farmers, Johnny said. Ted told him they were for eating, and Johnny had laughed. That had hurt, but it hurt even more now, thinking about it, and about how much he missed Johnny.
    The summer was starting to fade now, not that it got any cooler, but there was a change in the air. Light looked different, colder, even though your skin couldn’t feel the difference.
    At least this night would be a little better than most. He was having a quiet Sunday meal withEllie and her father. He ran through the chores, making sure the horses were fed, putting a new shake wall on the shed behind the house. When he was finished nailing the shakes in place, he pulled a few splinters out of his fingers and stepped back to admire his handiwork.
    The new wood made the rest of the place look shabby. He remembered houses like it, back in Alabama, where he was born. That part of his history was so long gone, it seemed like it must have been someone else’s life. Something would jog his memory and he would stand there and look at it, the way he would a skeleton out on the flats. You’d see the bones, poke at them a little, try to picture what they looked like with meat on them, a little color instead of the washed-out gray-white of the